Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/106

 98 DEMETRIUS. war in giving peace its jjleasures and joya, seems to have been his pattern among the gods. He was wonderfully fond of his father Antigonus ; and the tenderness he had for his mother led him, for her sake, to redouble attentions, which it was evident were not so much owing to fear or duty as to the more powerful inot'ves of inclination. It is reported, that, returning one da}- froin hunting, he went immediately into the apart- ment oi' Antigonus, who was conversing with some am- bassadors, and after stepping up and kissing his father, he sat down bj' him, just as he was, still holding in his hand the javelins which he had brought with him. Where- upon Antigonus, who had just dismissed the ambassadors with their answer, called out in a loud voice to them, as they were going, " Mention, also, that this is the way in which we two live together ; " as if to imply to them that it was no slender mark of the power and security of his government that there was so perfect a. good understand- ing between himself and his son. Such an unsociable, solitary thing is power, and so much of jealous}^ and dis- trust in it, that the first and greatest of the successors of Alexander could make it a thing to glory in that he was not so afraid of his son as to forbid his standing beside hira with a weapon m his hand. And, in fact, among all the successors of Alexander, that of Antigonus was the only house which, for many descents, was exempted from crime of this kind ; or, to state it exactly, Philip was the only one of this family who was guilty of a son's death. All the other families, we may fairly say, afforded fre- quent examples of fathers who brought their children, husbands their wives, children their mothers, to untimely ends ; and that brothers should put brothers to death was a,ssumed, like the postulates of mathematicians, as the common and recognized royal first principle of safety.